The very first front page of the Hampton Gazette reported on our town’s agricultural roots. Pearl Scarpino’s “Under All Is the Land” also chronicled the slow demise of the family farm. Like so many towns in New England, the Industrial Revolution beckoned residents to the mills established in neighboring communities such as Willimantic and Danielson, while Hampton’s population, and its farms, dwindled. During the Depression, our dairy farms numbered thirty. The 1957 Grand List named 21, and by 1978, the year the article was published, there were only four left. Now there is only one.

Unlike many other Connecticut towns, however, Hampton has escaped suburban sprawl and the encroachment of commercial enterprises, and in terms of agriculture, we seem to have reinvented ourselves with the times. Chickens — so many chickens! — have replaced all those cows, and vegetables have replaced larger grain crops.

In 2010, the Gazette featured all the farmers who were starting to sell vegetables from their gardens: Bird Song Farm offering 35 varieties of vegetables, Turtle Ledge Farm selling weekly to subscribers, Indian Ledge Farm, which piled its daily produce into a wagon parked in front of the General Store, Full Moon Farm operating a market Saturdays in an old barn, Christadore’s Corn Crib, and the Farmer’s Market at Chapel’s Greenhouse, where local vendors gathered with  tailgates full of whatever was growing for the hundred or so customers who spent  Friday afternoons there to socialize and to shop.

Along with the eggs and vegetables, products sold here are also derived from our pastures and orchards, our maple trees and our honey bees. This was most recently evidenced in the Fletcher Memorial Library’s “Homegrown” event.  We expected to stop in for a few minutes and instead, spent three hours visiting with vendors and sampling their items.  Farmers were represented by well-known establishments and new neighbors alike.

Dragon Fly Farm’s display was filled with maple products – candy, candied nuts and brittle, River Valley Farm with honey and goat’s milk soap, and Full Moon Farm with freshly picked asparagus. Pebble Brook Farm produced maple cotton candy, along with jugs of maple syrup and jars of maple cream. Cuprak’s Cupboard featured an assortment of jams, common selections such as strawberry, raspberry and blueberry, and unusual varieties such as “Peach Rosemary” and “Razzy Rhubarb”. At the Barton Farms table, one could purchase pots of parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, along with cilantro and basil, and a roasted root vegetable hot sauce – “Dragon’s Blood Elixir — Guaranteed to Cure Bland Food”.

Alongside these familiar farms and faces were new neighbors. Mennonite families were offering fresh bread and fresh eggs, pear butter and apple butter, and an absolutely beautiful bouquet of flowers attracted visitors to a table advertising whole chickens.

“Community Exchange” was the way Charity Stoltzfus of Riverstone Farm described the Mennonite’s philosophy, explaining with the example, “we planted someone’s potatoes this week, and roofed another family’s home”.  This tradition was the cornerstone of our town’s past.

“Hampton Remembers”, Alison Davis’ chronicle of “A Small Town in New England, 1885 – 1950”, describes, “In those days Hampton was quite self-sufficient with nearly everything a family needed available right here in town. From ‘cradle to grave’ you were cared for by your fellow townspeople.”  From barn-raising to husking bees, many of the town’s agricultural efforts were communal. And while the Hampton farm was largely independent, with families raising their own cows, chickens, goats, sheep and crops, most farms were dependent on someone else’s “specialty” as well, which in turn generated revenue for individual families. This custom is also recorded in “Hampton Remembers”.

When I was first married I made butter, put the cream in an old-fashioned churn, with a crank you turned ‘round, then you had to mold it in pound molds. Then I hitched up the horse, took the wagon and went up to the store on Hampton Hill. One day in particular I took thirty-three pounds and got thirty cents a pound for it so I had 9.90. I bought all the food I needed and had some left to put in my pocket.

Lucy Lewis

My father used to do market gardening and raise cucumbers for pickles. He put them up in jars – they were called Valley View Pickles. He took all his vegetables in crates and his pickles to Willimantic to be sold in the grocery stores there.

Vera Hoffman

We had five or six cows and we sold milk to the neighbors. All around us was summer folks, you might say. That was my job, I used to run around to the neighbors and deliver the milk on my bicycle, the bottles of milk in the basket on the handlebars.

Robert Fitts

We brought the coal from Hampton Station and delivered it to homes and we cut ice at Bigelow Pond and filled Hampton icehouses.

Bertha Burnham

On our farm we had a large sugar maple grove and produced about a hundred gallons of maple syrup every spring that we sold locally for $4.00 a gallon. The syrup along with the apples and huckleberries and cranberries that we picked and sold brought in a nice little extra income for our big family.

Arthur Kimball

We used to pick huckleberries in the summertime and Mr. Clapp at Elliot Store would give us ten cents a quart the first week, nine the

next and when it got down so’s he was giving us three cents a quart then we picked to preserve for our own use… We used to get our firewood, we used to sell wood and I remember it was four dollars a cord, sawed and delivered.

Harold Stone

Not many made cheese but my mother made cheese. She had to have a lot of fresh milk and she put it in a big tub made of tin. She put the rennet into it at the beginning. Then she let it stand and it curdled or set, like custard, and then she cut that up a little bit so it would be easier to handle and the idea was that she must have all the sweetness, the drippings out of the cheese and have just the custard part left. So it was put in a cheese box of 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 pounds and in a cheesecloth and put in big presses that would do 2, 3,4 cheeses at a time. Each press had a cover screwed down which pressed out the whey and after a few more days no more whey came out. But my mother looked at the cheese each day and covered it with oil to keep it from getting too dry right on top. She trimmed the curd that squeezed out around the edges (and I was always standing with my mouth open waiting for a little bite). It took probably a matter of two or three months of her pressing it a little every day to get all the moisture out of it. When it was done she sold the cheese.

Helen Mathews

In my lifetime I’ve seen so many things change. When Grampa used to do the delivery for Annah Burnham’s Inn he used to go down to New London and pick up her customers and bring them up – and then regulations came in that you had to have a special license so he gave it up. And the same thing happened about his dressing off the beef to take it to Gallup’s store – the regulations came through and you could only do it for your own family consumption but not for sale. And my father couldn’t sell chickens anymore because of regulations. Of course the raw milk couldn’t be sold – you had all the inspections. All these regulations changed everyone’s lives.  I’m not disagreeing with it but I’m just mentioning it to show how much our lives have changed.

Ethel Jaworski